Cassandra shook her head slightly. "I never felt any affection for him," she said flatly. "Scarcely anything at all, not even hate. He did what conquering heroes do to the defeated women. And until recently, I just assumed that's how things always worked." She remembered, clearly, Cris' disgust when she told him the story about what had happened in the temple of Athene. It was as if she were describing an alien world to him. Perhaps she was.

"But I never...forgot what he did to me...what he was doing...Not in the heat of any moment."